marriage is between one man and one woman… unless…

In years past, i didn’t use synaesthetic as a place to vent only my political views. But since i’ve started from scratch a few weeks ago, it seems that my focus has been more on politics and social commentary instead of introspection, as it was for most of the time.

I did not always have the opinion i now have regarding “gay rights”. I’ll explain the quotes later. Years ago i remember telling someone that gays didn’t get rights because they were an invisible minority and any discrimination they encountered could only be because they decided to let people know they had ‘teh gay’.

It was immature, anti-democratic and it was a small minded, bigoted view that was in direct contradiction to my spiritual beliefs as a Christian. But it would take some time, introspection and maturity to realize that.
So the federal government is in the business of defining what a marriage is and is not. That, in and of itself, is a bizarre concept to me. But that’s not what this is about. This is about the ongoing debate about marriage and how it pertains to to the laws of the United States. And from where i stand, this debate isn’t about morality- it’s about the law. It’s not just about living up to the rhetoric of, “…with liberty and justice for all”. It is but it’s more than that. It’s also about having a democracy behaving as a democracy. That is, to apply the belief that the Constitutional values of equal protection, equal access and due process (among others) are applied to each and every citizen and persons within our rule.

And it doesn’t really matter what i might personally think marriage should be. I don’t look to my government to dictate morality to me. In fact, history demonstrates government is the LAST place that morality should come from. Consider the Dred Scott decision, slavery in general, the genocide of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of First Nations Peoples, the treatment of Catholics and especially Irish Catholics in the 18th century, the Trail of Tears, concentration camps for the Japanese during WW2, apartheid, the eviction of the people of and the annihilation of the Bikini atoll, feeding plutonium to black soldiers, the rationales behind the Viet Nam war, the abandonment of the people of New Orleans by the Bush administration, etc… Then examine people like Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and most recently, George W. Bush. It’s pretty safe to say the government is the LEAST credible source of morality.

It’s like i tell people: asking the government for morality is like asking a whore for sincerity. Ironically, those who seem to clamor most to conservative values, one pillar of which is the government to not interfere in the private affairs of individuals, are also the first ones to claim that, among other things, that interracial couples, those with teh gay should not be allowed to marry.

Putting all hypocrisy aside, this is what it comes down to. Each of us are guaranteed the same rights as everyone else. This isn’t to be discussed, debated nor questioned. We tried that route already and it ended violently [from the Civil War to the WATTS riots]. It doesn’t matter if you don’t approve of ‘gay marriage’. If you don’t like it, don’t be gay and get married. Having two men or two women in a marriage does not threaten your marriage or familial unit in any way, shape nor form. And the argument that it threatens marriage is just another white right wing fantasy like Larry Craig is straight or that Michelle Bachman is a voice of sanity and reason. If having gay couples marry were any threat to anyone, i think the divorce rate in Massachusetts would have skyrocketed by now. It hasn’t. And to the best of my knowledge, divorce rates in Spain haven’t increased because their courts recognized that all of their citizens get the same rights.

Eventually bigotry cannot win. Not in this nation at least. Eventually the white nationalists will lose this one too, just as they lost their “right” to own slaves, the right to maintain “separate but equal” and the way they lost the legislation that prevented interracial couples from getting married.

So to those who refuse to believe that equal access, due process and the same overall rights they enjoy also apply to gay couples because of your religious views, i want to give you some helpful advice- you really need to enjoy a country where your government speaks with the voice of God. And to that end, i strongly urge you to move to Saudia Arabia or at the least, Iran. Yes, please go enjoy the warm security of a government that will do its best to see that you are liberated from sin, where homosexuals are murdered with a brutality that will make you happy and where women are regarded as nothing more than devices for making more boys. Meanwhile, sanity, reason and justice will continue to work in the United States to see that your kind will be remembered with all the malice, contempt and shame that you deserve.